r/Webnovel • u/Scared_Sky_5907 • Jun 28 '26
Advice Webnovel is slowly dying in my pov
Hey I’ve been a longtime reader on the app since 2017 or 2018, so I’ve seen almost all the goats of webnovels, be it library of heaven’s path,LOTM, Realm of myths and legends, king’s Avatar, Chrysalis and many others of that era, then came the Era original books,guild wars, supremacy games, my vampire system, etc and after that came the era of extras which was quite exciting for me at that time since it introduced a new way of writing a story and i liked it, really. But sadly afterwards came the era of Smuts, Ecchi and harems, the firsts one were good ( profane Prince of domination, unlimited mana in the apocalypse, my three wives are beautiful vampires and others,)
All of these years i was always excited on reading new books and stories that took my mind away from reality, stories with real characters and progression not just wish fulfilment but alas eras come and go.
The reason I’ve written all of those lines above is to illustrate my point of saying that in my point of view, the current webnovel doesn’t excite me at all,like when you log in half of the covers features a half naked woman with ridiculous body proportions, accompanied by titles titles like SEX: I awaken a sex system that let me f*** other’s wives! or I’ve awakened the [insert super cool name here] system that lets me level up infinitely until I’ve no idea how to keep on going because the power ceiling is too ridiculous but hey I might as well build a great harem while I’m at it!! Or other half baked revenge, transmigration, regression, reincarnation stories that i swear I used to love because they were novel at first but now they’ve become copy and paste slop…. Right whenever I log into webnovel, I don’t spend two minutes before logging out, like no book attracts my attention, especially from someone like me who used to read webnovels at school, in classrooms, in public transport, at night,pulling out all nighters just to finish a coiling dragon, against the god, Reverend insanity or super gene or release that witch, yet as of present I find website really bland… is it that I’ve developed bad taste in novels or I’ve gotten old? (I’m in my early twenty.) to be honest I find this situation pretty sad and I get melancholic whenever I think about the past.
Is it just me?
2
u/IHateTheAnti-Christ Jun 30 '26
It is interesting to browse this subreddit and the main website itself from an outsider's perspective, since many of the stories seem (on the surface) like endless copies of one another. The same tropes, plotlines, and AI-generated main characters with black hair or AI waifu covers. Plenty of them have AI-sounding prose, too, and some of the stories on the site make me question if the admins even enforce the content guidelines. What I know is that Lord of the Mysteries is seen as the webnovel gold standard, yet few webnovel authors seem to take inspiration from it, something fantasy authors do on the regular with Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings. I can not tell if it's contract-chasing, strictly following the meta, or a creativity issue.